Iain Mackay and Silvia Jimenez have confirmed that they will be leaving Birmingham Royal Ballet at the end of the current Swan Lake season. The dancers, who were married last year, will be moving to Madrid.

The official premiere of "Corella Ballet" will be with La Bayadere (Natalia Makarova) at the Teatro Real in Madrid, in September 4, 2008, but already on July 11 and 12, the "Corella Ballet" will perform at La Granja (Segovia) where the Company is set. The program will be “Clear” (Stanton Welch); “Bruch Violín Concerto nº 1 (Clark Tippet) and “In the Upper Room” (Twyla Tharp).

Just to inform you that tickets for La Granja will be on sale from today, June 24, at La Granja Town Council, Sfera shops and at El corte Inglés at a price: 25-45 €. At el Corte Inglés they can be purchased on-line El Corte Inglés – Ticketsor by phone: +34 921 470018

For La Bayadère in Madrid, September 2008, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 & 10 at 20:00 h. tickets will be on sale from July 15. Teatro Real – Tickets

For La Bayadère at El Liceu in Barcelona, July 2009, 9, 10 (two shows) & 11 (two shows) Gran Teatre del Liceu, tickets will be on sale from July 14 at 09:00 a.m. Ángel Corella will perform on July 9, at 8 pm and on July 11, at 10 pm.

Please join me in wishing good luck and long life to the Corella Ballet!! Ángel deserves this!!

_________________To know more about ballet and dance in Spain you can visit "http://balletymas.com/" web page with some articles also in English

Greetings
It's a bit less international that I was expecting from earlier reports, but the scarcity of non-EU dancers below the soloist level is not surprising given EU hiring regulations. I would not be surprised if some of the Americans listed in the corps also have citizenship in a EU country. [Most companies do not allow non-EU citizens to allow auditions, though they may be able to hire non-EU dancers with experience depending upon the willingness of the national immigrations authority to grant work permits and the availability of equivalent EU talent.] But I'm happy to see that lots of Spanish dancers are getting a chance to be a part of the company, rather than having a company spliced together from mostly foreign dancers. I think have some sort of national identity will be vital in creating lasting support for the company within Spain.

More intriguingly, the company numbers only 48 plus apprentices (actually 46 according to the names on the website), with a few dancers (Corella, Cornejo) having part-time commitments elsewhere. For some reason, I thought the company was going to be a fair bit larger. Was Corella not able to find enough dancers of sufficient quality or was 48 the limit with available funding or did they decide to start smaller?

It will be interesting to see how they approach 'La Bayadere' - especially doing two performances in one day - which needs a large female corps in addition to having a number of soloist/principal female roles. I think even ABT, which does a slightly smaller version, uses 24 Shades, which is two more than Corella Ballet has in it's corps. Do they intend to do a cut down version (Shades-wise), hire in extras for the production or ???

I also wonder if it's the best choice for a first full length with a smaller, less experience corps - no matter how good your soloists are, if your Shades corp is wobbly or out of synch, the ballet won't pass muster. And there's nothing for the Shades to hide behind - it's do or die. I'd think it a big shame if the company got 'mauled' by the corps on it's first big outing just because the rep choice was poor. Perhaps they'd be best sticking with more mix rep programs - like the very first - until the company is a bit more experienced. They could do excerpts from the big ballets - like a smaller Shades scene or bits of Swan Lake - but in tandem with other pdd or excerpts so that if one bit was a bit wobbly, it wouldn't take down the whole evening.

The weather was awful, it was raining a lot on Friday afternoon and nobody expected that the performance would take place but as it stopped, everybody, including the dancers with Ángel at their head started throwing away the water and drying the site. The show began more that an hour after schedule in a very, very, cold night, so it was nearly 24:00 h.

But there was great expectation to see what this brand new company looked like after so few time rehearsing together. And even the most optimistic ones got astonished

We knew about the high quality of some principals, and even some corps members, but the whole company really looked very compact, very settled and they succeeded in the three choreographies with great command.

Audience has been very grateful about them dancing in such bad conditions because not only the cold but the humidity was present and the floor on stage was wet, making it very difficult and dangerous for the dancers. On Saturday it didn’t rain but the cold and the difficulties were the same and they succeeded again.

Ángel was radiant, happy and very grateful to his team and to the attendants, a cold night that it seemed to me one of the warmest in my life.

A report will follow but just to share with you all a bit of my emotion.

_________________To know more about ballet and dance in Spain you can visit "http://balletymas.com/" web page with some articles also in English

An article of Julie Kavanagh has been Published on Intelligent Life (The Economist) about our brand new company

Quote:

LIFT-OFF

• FINE & PERFORMING ARTS

ANGEL CORELLA'S NEW TURN | July 15th 2008

Spain has ballet stars, but no major ballet company. Now one of those stars, ANGEL Corella, is launching his own. Julie Kavanagh watches it take shape ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Summer 2008

Spain's dance heritage dates back to Carthaginian times, when castanets were seashells, but its classical ballet tradition is 30 years old, if that. Since 1978 small ballet companies have started up and petered out, and yet half a dozen international stars--American Ballet Theatre's ANGEL Corella and the Royal Ballet's Tamara Rojo among them--owe their fabulous techniques to Spanish training. It was because there was no native company for him to join that the 19-year-old Corella was forced to go abroad, leaving home in Madrid and joining ABT, with only a few words of English, in 1995. Rumours of his gifts sparked such a buzz that he was profiled in the New York Times before making his American debut, and today you have only to Google "Corella pirouettes" to see why. YouTube has clips of his trademark multiple turns taken from a single preparation, his 1994 gold-medal-winning solo, his reinvention of hackneyed old variations from "Don Quixote"; and "Le Corsaire".

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